Writer Wednesday!

Happy Wednesday, everyone! As you’ve probably noticed by now, I take just about every opportunity I come across to post teasers that will drive all of you (however many there may or may not be of you…) nuts. If you hadn’t noticed, well, I just made it quite clear. So it is with absolutely no guilt, shame, remorse or any other kinds of bad feelings for your suffering that I post this for you! A snippet from Howl. 😀

Cheers and happy hump day (bonus points if it’s a literal hump day for you 😉 ),

Murphy

—

He shook his head slowly, baffled, then looked up at her. “Tis you,” he continued in that same slow tone. “You’ve distracted me. I’ve not been able to focus from the moment you set foot through the door, or I’d have known. I can hear it now. The babe’s heartbeat,” he added. His eyes heated and he stood, moving slowly around the table to cross the empty kitchen towards her. “But yours is louder.”

“My heartbeat?” Now it was Brenna’s turn to be baffled. “You can hear my heart beating?”

He nodded. “Aye. Tis a very steady beat, your heart. As stubborn as the rest of you. And it’s the loudest thing I can hear.”

“Get earplugs,” she suggested, frowning as he kept approaching her. He was getting too close, dammit. Fae or not, he’d had enough years among humans to know when he was infringing on personal space and he needed to back the hell off.

But damned if she’d be first to step back.

“I’ve tried,” he said in that same persistent voice. “I’ve tried all I can think of. Starving myself of sleep to the brink of exhaustion, so that I’ve no choice but to sleep or I’d lose my wits; exercise of all kinds; fantasizing—”

“Fantasizing?” she interrupted. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“About what I’d do to you. I’ll show you,” he said simply. His hands came up and framed her face, and even as her heart jackhammered wildly in her chest, she couldn’t seem to find the strength to lift her hands and nudge him back, just that one shove on the chest that would make him get the hint and get out of her face.

Did she even want him to stop? She couldn’t decide. She needed to think—but she didn’t get to. In the next instant his mouth was on hers, and he was still stepping forwards, so that now she had to give in, just a little, a slight yield to avoid being entirely overwhelmed. She stepped back, once then again when he continued to move into her. When her back pressed into the wall, he was still, only holding her as his mouth coaxed hers into responding.

She didn’t care what Jeremy had said. She wasn’t cold. She felt. Right now, too much. Everything and not enough all at once. She wanted to make him stop, she wanted to drag him to the floor and not let either of them stop until they were exhausted—and it was terrifying.

Finally, with more effort than it should have taken, Aedhán pried himself back from her. His eyes, Brenna thought in a rare moment of whimsy, were like molten amber now, the colour you might find a dragonfly imprisoned within.

And she was suddenly, irrationally terrified that she would find herself trapped within him, like a dragonfly within the amber. She couldn’t have moved in that instant even if he’d pulled out a knife and moved to slit her throat.

He leaned in close. When his mouth brushed her ear, she shuddered and hated herself. “That was the first time I kissed you,” he said in a low voice. “It won’t be the last.” He stepped back, noting with great pleasure the heat in her cheeks and the brilliance of her eyes. And he smiled. “I’ll be seeing more of you, Mary Brenna.”